[VMWare] Device uses a controller that is not supported

Today I tried to deploy a Virtual Appliance from Bitnami on my ESXi server using ovftool:

ovftool.exe bitnami-xxx.vmx vi://192.168.0.100

But each time I had an error:

Device ‘VirtualDisk’ uses a controller that is not supported. This is a general limitation of the virtual machine’s virtual hardware version on the selected host.

What was funny, it was perfectly fine if I converted the virtual machine to OVA format and started it using… VirtualBox.

I googled a bit and found out that some people had that similar problems and what they did was to upgrade virtual hardware from version 4 to 7. It wasn’t a solution for me because I already had version 7 – so maybe the problem was that I had “too new” virtual hardware? I opened bitnami-xxx.vmx file with a text editor and there I had:

virtualHW.version = "4"

I changed it to “7” and voila – it worked!